Exploratory Navigation for Runners Through Geographic Area Classification with Crowd-Sourced Data

Abstract

Navigation when running is exploratory, characterised by both starting and ending in the same location, and iteratively foraging the environment to find areas with the most suitable running conditions. Runners do not wish to be explicitly directed, or refer to navigation aids that cause them to stop running, such as maps. Such undirected navigation is also common in other 'on-foot' scenarios, but how to support it is under-investigated. We contribute a novel method that uses crowd-sourced venue databases to rate a geographical area on its suitability to run in using linear regression. Our regression model is able to accurately predict the suitability of an area to run in (Pearson r=0.74) with a low mean error (RMSE=1.0). We outline how our method can support runners, and can be applied to other undirected navigation scenarios.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.